Where 2.0 comes to Europe – Geoware2007

Life is really busy at the moment, but I am finally in a position to put down a few thoughts about this weeks Geoware in Arhus.

I was very impressed by the organisation and quality of speakers, credit is due to Anders, Peter and the rest of the team at the innovation lab for putting the event together.

Nicholas Nova who gave a very interesting talk on mobile gaming gives a good review of the event on his blog. This is the closet I have seen to the “must visit” Where 2.0 in Europe.

To me one of the most interesting debates was around business models for these new mobile services, and the fact that for the most part quite traditional business models based on advertising or commission payments underlie these new services.

Nokia for example who demonstrated the N95 smartphone ( Forget the iPhone, this is the phone for geo-geeks) which ships with a free mapping and navigation package for Europe, with POI data sponsored by Restaurants, Hotels, Car hire companies etc. Nokia receive a commission from any transaction, such as booking a hotel which comes from their mobile service – a business model as old as publishing !
I wonder if we will see a similar event in the UK , and if so who would organise it? I know from trying to run the innovation process at the OS how difficult a task it is to get UK companies to think along these lines… and of course the other obvious challenges to GI based startups regarding availability of data are well known.

This has built in gps and will come with bundled Route66 s/w with relevant country specific mapping, i.e. uk phones will have UK maps. Release date was quoted as ‘Q2’. Before buying an N95 I’d recommend checking out the 6110 as well.